Skip Freeman  · eonrspoSdt8656904u6a1ht12a1979t5t2c5511lg699alg0l292600a521l  · Shared with Members of Evernote CommunityHEPTABASE - I started evaluating Evernote alternatives back in late Summer. I have fallen in love with Heptabase. No trial & not cheap. Here is who it is & is not for:FOR: Someone who needs to pull together complex topics from multiple sources & make sense of them all. Cards are created for information and can contain as much or as little info as appropriate. Each card consists of "blocks" so, information can be connected and/or extracted. Tags can be used too. Putting it all together on a WHITEBOARD is the ULTIMATE MAGIC where everything is visual and connected.Additionally, you can create tables & Kanban boards (it's a database).Students, academia, someone working on complex projects (but note, it is NOT PM software), someone doing research (I sure wish I had had this when I was working on my Master's thesis), are all going to love Heptabase.I will provide an example. I am a student of Chris Voss' negotiation techniques as presented in his book "Never Split the Difference." (Tactical Empathy is the overarching term he uses).As I read the book on Kindle, I made many highlights. My highlights go into Readwise, and I have Readwise connected to Heptabase, so all of my notes from Kindle are visible.Next, I also have many notes I have taken from listening to Voss on podcasts, YouTubes, plus papers, and blogs.Trying to organize and make sense of everything is daunting and complex.In parallel, I am a professional executive recruiter. I am working on figuring out how to use Voss' concepts of tactical empathy to improve hiring processes for companies. Trying to do it with traditional notes and folders is impossible.Laying everything out on a Heptabase whiteboard and being able to connect things, move things around, and more, I began to see the overarching methodology and how I could apply tactical empathy in recruiting, thus helping companies hire better. I am working on a book now and would have never gotten this far this fast with other applications.While I have certainly not tried them all, I have tried Mem.AI, Rome Research, MyMind, Notion, continued to use Evernote, OneNote, and I know there are a couple more in there that I can't remember the name of at the moment. WHO HEPTABASE IS NOT FOR: If one is looking for a to-do app, just general note-taking without the need for figuring out how all of the concepts fit together, or to just have an inexpensive depository for things which can be searched on (and I WOULD recommend MyMind for that), then Heptabase is not for you. They do not have a trial, and the subscription is $13 a month. Since it is a little more complicated, the psychology, at least for me, was that I had to make good use of my $13 and learn how to work the software. It's a little more complicated than most, but in the end, it is the best I've ever used.Help is available within 12 to 24 hours. I've developed a nice relationship with PJ in China They are bringing out an improvement almost weekly and the upgrades are quick and easy. You do not have to worry about losing data. Also, a history of all of your cards are kept so if somehow one gets messed up, you can go back to a previous version and retrieve everything.I've gotten carried away sharing my enthusiasm for Heptabase and made this into a much longer post than I intended, but I do hope my analysis helps someone.

Just to understand well Obsidian/Heptabase, if we take the example of Card in Heptabase = Note in Osbidian, and Whiteboard in Heptabase = Canva in Obsidian, what Heptabase do that Obsidian do not? What is your view about that?

Excited to share a sneak peek of my new @obsdmd plugin :) • Browse the web spatially on an infinite canvas 💠 • Visually organize and connect your notes, videos, pdfs and websites 🛸 • Sketch and mind-map over a whiteboard

Heptabase’s split writing experience

Heptabase review

Heptabase is not designed to do anything useful with 100, much less 5000, .pdfs thrown in all at once. And that's the first big difference with say Obsidian, it doesn't really try to pretend it is good at large volume collecting, it wants a curated set of Topic Notes as input. Of course it can collect, but that is not the speciality.What Heptabase does focus on is converting Topic Notes into quality Zettles, Contexts, MOCs and Permanent Notes. That is stages (3) and (4).

I’m in the early days yet in Obsidian but was really taken with the workflow that Heptabase affords for research and synthesis of new information. Nothing else I’ve seen is as clean in terms of the workflow to extract bits of information to manipulate and digest on a whiteboard. Very strongly inclined to include it to be my research and learning ground, while Obsidian serves as my polished topic notes repository. I’d been looking for a direct comparison of the two and hadn’t yet found anything out there.

Anything temporal.Todo tracking. Hepta has todo lists and a daily journal l, Todos aren't treated any differently than other data. Journal is lacking a lot of journal features.Dependency trackingOngoing activity trackingIn short a project is a MOC / whiteboard... no different than any area of interest with very little in the way to time management.Coordination between multiple people. Heptabase offers a nice sharing system but that's it. It encourages an idiosyncratic non-standard way of working which will be difficult for other people to consume.An authoring system. Most good note taking systems have the problem of creating an idiosyncratic system. Many though have tools for export into public forms (Scrivener for book length documents, Ulysses for articles, Dendron a codebase, Zettlr an academic paper...). Heptabase lacks an export authoring system. It would pair wonderfully with most of the systems that do have this (the Obsidian -> Zettlr above would work equally well with Heptabase).Bulk operations. In particular mass document archival and manipulation. There is no easy way to get a lot of information into Heptabase nor any easy way to manipulate it once it is in there. I discussed this in the review. I should mention many PKMS are not good at this, you see these features a lot more in the KMS space (departmental or enterprise knowledge management).On a related note: handling of sound, photos.... is poor you can attach to a note and that's about it.No graph view. Not really needed but it would be nice. I've thought about importing to Obsidian just for the graph.Creative design. Doesn't matter to me but for the very right brained who like to draw...Total information preserving export. This one does worry me a bit. I'm experiencing the pain of partial but pretty good information preservation in moving notes out of VoodooPad.So what I'm doing is pairing with:Work systems / client specifictodo systemOngoing areas where activities and notes are both required. May or may not be in my todo, still deciding.retention / archival systemarea specific solutions (example music).

Heptabase is only able to offer both ease of creation and administratin on the same note because it breaks with both Zettlr and Obsidian in having the version of the markdown note safe for a human (as opposed to a computer) to edit be an export only format. But that of course breaks with a fundamental paradigm in Obsidian that your notes are always just a bunch of markdown files importable and exportable to anything. In Heptabase they aren't. Heptabase simplifies the workflow by making the data structure of notes too exacting for a human.

when you export from Heptabase the export filename is the current card name, while in the actual production local directory Heptabase uses the card/filename is the guid. The card "Synology pricing" can be renamed "Synology 2022/3 systems retail pricing" if I discover I do want to also look at the used market, and on my "Which NAS to buy card" updates the name in the text automatically. That doesn't happen in Obsidian.